Montgomery County’s First Open Data Town Hall

November 21st, 2013 will mark Montgomery County’s first Open Data Town Hall at the Bethesda/Chevy Chase Regional Services Center (located at 4805 Edgemoor Lane, Bethesda) from 7 to 9 p.m. The Innovation Program is excited to host this event. All Montgomery County residents are welcome.

The goal of the Open Data Town Hall is to gather information from residents about the types of data they would like to have available on our open data platform, dataMontgomery. Chief Innovation Officer Dan Hoffman and Chief Information Officer Sonny Segal will be present at the meeting to give background on Montgomery County’s open data policy and progress.

The open data sharing platform, dataMontgomery, is the County’s official portal for open data. We offer datasets such as employee salaries, public school information, public parking, and food inspection readily available at the click of a button. The datasets can be sorted and filtered to the viewer’s liking. They can also be rated on a five-star scale and shared among social media platforms. Also, MoCo uses a scorecard to prioritize which datasets should be released. We continue to implement these aspects of open data that make us a leader in the field.

The format of the event will include a presentation by Dan and Sonny Segal to introduce open data and familiarize the audience with dataMontgomery. Then, participants will move around the room to stations holding discussions on different topics of open data, hosted by Innovation Fellows and facilitators. Lastly, facilitators will report out their opinions and findings from the Town Hall.

Check out the Innovation Program website for a follow-up after the event. We will discuss the findings and data priorities as stated by residents. To RSVP on Facebook, please click here. We hope to see you at the event!

Dan Hoffman, Chief Innovation Officer

Featured Project

The Thingstitute

The Thingstitute is pop-up co-working and lab space for the Innovation Program and its internet of things (IoT) projects. It will be a temporary home for our partners and county start-ups exploring IoT technology.